Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
The emancipation will be unsatisfactory to the advocates of perpetual
slavery, but the length of time should greatly mitigate their
dissatisfaction. The time spares both races from the evils of sudden
derangement--in fact, from the necessity of any derangement--while most
of those whose habitual course of thought will be disturbed by the
measure will have passed away before its consummation. They will never
see it. Another class will hail the prospect of emancipation, but will
deprecate the length of time. They will feel that it gives too little
to the now living slaves. But it really gives them much. It saves them
from the vagrant destitution which must largely attend immediate
emancipation in localities where their numbers are very great, and it
gives the inspiring assurance that their posterity shall be free
forever. The plan leaves to each State choosing to act under it to
abolish slavery now or at the end of the century, or at any
intermediate time, or by degrees extending over the whole or any part
of the period, and it obliges no two States to proceed alike. It also
provides for compensation, and generally the mode of making it. This,
it would seem, must further mitigate the dissatisfaction of those who
favor perpetual slavery, and especially of those who are to receive the
compensation. Doubtless some of those who are to pay and not to receive
will object. Yet the measure is both just and economical. In a certain
sense the liberation of slaves is the destruction of property--property
acquired by descent or by purchase, the same as any other property. It
is no less true for having been often said that the people of the South
are not more responsible for the original introduction of this property
than are the people of the North; and when it is remembered how
unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of
dealing in them, it may not be quite safe to say that the South has
been more responsible than the North for its continuance. If, then, for
a common object this property is to be sacrificed, is it not just that
it be done at a common charge?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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